And before the end of the cold war, USSR was a reactionary country governed by an elite for its own interests. It’s the same in China. The same in Vietnam, the same in Cuba (but at least there they have the excuse of the unjust US politics against them).
Eliminating homelessness, eliminating illiteracy, eliminating hunger, increasing life expectancies, increasing graduation rates, increasing quality of life, actually existing socialist countries accomplish incredible things (some more than others, admittedly). They’re not perfect utopias, but you can’t ignore the context they exist within (i.e. they’re still developing countries and they exist within US global hegemony)
I’m sure you have some specific criticisms of China or Cuba or whatever, but they’re doing pretty fucking good considering what they’re up against.
While you keep on dreaming of utopia, I’m more concerned with defeating than US empire in the real world. Anarchism can’t.
Capitalist countries did the same thing without building walls to stop their population to flee…
Not a single capitalist country has eliminated homelessness. Why is that? Why are life expectancies falling in the US?
Also, Berlin is in the middle of East Germany.
The wall was to separate what was basically an island of Western control from the rest of East Germany. It was kind of a weird political situation.